Shiver by Brigid Lowe review: 'immersive'
Brigid Lowe is a tremendously descriptive writer, says David Robinson, but in this absorbing cold-water swimming memoir she reveals surprisingly little about herself
“It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home,” says Pip in Great Expectations, and as an expert on the Victorian novel in her former career as an academic, Brigid Lowe could doubtless explain exactly why he said it. Yet that was something like what she felt about life in suburban Cheshire: shouty neighbours who complain about her three children laughing, about butterflies with the temerity to fly across from her garden to theirs or petals blown over their fence.
Even when lockdown ended, swimming was banned at the nearby nature reserve, where the waters were closed off with high barbed wire and smeared with anti-climb paint. When she tried to climb over, she was covered with the stuff. Reflecting on the damage oil does to seabirds, she concludes that England was her own personal oil slick. At least she and the children had managed to get away on a short camping and swimming trip to the lochs of the Galloway hills. “Looking back from Galloway, she writes, “I had at least begun to work it out of my feathers, before the storm came.”
The storm. It’s a metaphor for a major trauma Lowe suffered after moving to Portobello with her children to start a new life in Scotland. She is determined that her book won’t be about that trauma, and indeed it is hardly mentioned directly, although she admits that “after it, my cold-water swimming, which had been a chosen luxury, became an obsession and a necessity.” Yet Shiver isn’t, she insists, about wild swimming as a “nature cure” but as something worth celebrating in its own right for the way in which it plunges one, albeit through the pain barrier hinted at in her title, into a deeper, all-senses-open connection with the natural world.
Unlike the “jaundiced plains of Cheshire”, unlike England where only three per cent of inland waters are open to the public, where seven times more of its bathing waters are in poor condition, Scotland is where she sets herself the target of swimming in a thousand lochs, and in places as varied as Portobello Beach and the fibrous limestone pools of Skye’s Spar Cave. Before too long she has fallen in love with the country, its myths, legends, flowers, rocks and varied waters - and her own natatory process of finding out about them all.
The American writer Grace Paley used to say that every story is two stories - the one on the surface and the one bubbling beneath, and the climax is when they collide. Though she was talking about fiction, I can’t help thinking that it also applies to Lowe’s book too, insofar as it can be separated into a) the story of her life and b) how swimming has added to it.
At first, I was frustrated by how little she revealed about herself. The biographical note says that she “traces her descent from travellers, circus performers, mill workers and gallowglass warriors” but to me that is the least interesting thing about her. This is a highly intelligent woman - a former Cambridge Fellow, no less - whose only income at one point seems to come from letting out her Porty flat in the summer. This allows her to spend the holidays wild camping (and swimming) with her children, yet when they are with their father, she is reduced to sleeping in the boot of her Astra, eating cold food out of tins on a park bench or sitting in libraries for warmth. I wanted to read far more about her.
Why? First, when I first understood what she meant by “the storm”, for obvious reasons of empathy. But mainly because Lowe is a tremendously descriptive writer. I could give plenty of examples, but maybe I don’t have to: she has already won a Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award for a first-time writer of non-fiction. Certainly I don’t expect to read a more - sorry - immersive book this year.
Shiver, by Brigid Lowe, Elliot & Thompson, £16.99
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Enjoying the Arts & Culture journalism on scotsman.com? Make it easier to find by selecting us as a preferred Google source
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.